


The Fullness of Joy

by CaitlynRose



Category: A Star is Born (2018)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 11:57:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18992188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitlynRose/pseuds/CaitlynRose
Summary: Ally doesn't take it for granted. Not one bit of it.





	The Fullness of Joy

She’d told him she wasn’t going to come out. It was his night, she’d said, and she was tired. She really just wanted to have a couple of drinks and hang with the crew. And anyway, it wasn’t good for people to think that the two of them were always a package deal - that every time they came to see Jackson Maine, they were definitely going to get Ally into the bargain, or vice versa.

Then, about an hour in and for no reason (or at least, none she could articulate), she just finds she can’t resist. It’s been a fucking _great_ show so far, and she’s giddy with the sound and the smell and the feel of it all. And the sight of him. God, the sight of him out there.

Uttering not so much as a word to anyone around her, Ally darts out onto the stage in the middle of _Too Far Gone_ , heading straight for the back left corner beside Lukas. The guitarist smiles broadly at her as she leans into his mic, joining him on backing vocals without any fanfare. Her hair isn’t done, and whatever make-up she’d put on that morning is probably long gone by now, and the shorts and flip flop sandals she’s wearing would probably give Rez Gambler - wherever the fuck he is these days - an actual heart attack. But, none of that remotely crosses her mind. She’s just happy.

She’s not sure what Jack notices first - the sound of her voice in the mix, or the building excitement of the crowd in front of him as people start to register her presence - but either way it doesn’t take long for him to turn around to her with a big grin, his eyebrows raised in an unspoken _what are you doing here?_

She shrugs, smiling back at him. _Just felt like it._

Not missing a lyric, he points towards the spot beside him, front and centre, and she just shakes her head laughingly. She’s staying right where she is, she tells him wordlessly.

Jack turns back to the crowd then, giving them an exaggerated shrug - an _I tried_ \- and he plays on, his back and shoulders lurching with each downward strum on his guitar.

It’s kind of cool, Ally thinks, to see him from this vantage point. She lets herself focus on him, on the lines and rhythm of his body, not worrying too much about what’s coming out of her mouth. She’s not the star of this particular show, and anyway, if there’s one thing she knows how to do backwards and forwards and with her eyes closed, it’s find a harmony with Jackson Maine’s voice.

When at last the final strains of his guitar fade, he tilts around towards her again, pulling the mic stand to meet his mouth.

“How ‘bout that Ally Maine, huh?” he says wryly, and the audience cheers wildly. It feels to her like pure joy - not because of the sound from the arena so much as the expression on her husband’s face.

“Would you get up here?” Jack adds then, mock impatiently, and she gives in, skipping up beside him, putting her arms around him. Against her palm, she can feel his back throbbing with heat.

“You gonna stay for another one?” he asks, for her ears only, and she smiles, shaking her head.

“Uh-uh. I got the best seat in the house over there,” she says, and with a little salute to the audience, she makes for the side of stage.

Jack keeps hold of her fingertips until the very last second.  

\-----

There’s no plan for an after party but somehow one develops all on its own. Various members of the band and crew have partners or other family members visiting, and everyone holes up in somebody’s suite, instruments and drinks in tow. There are even a few kids in the mix. Ally’s heart melts at the sight of Gail's toddler, fast asleep in her party dress on a futon in the corner, and then it melts all over again as she watches Jack sitting intently with Johnny’s 11-year-old for a good twenty minutes, offering a word of encouragement here or there as the boy picks out something on the banjo.

At any given point, there are five conversations and three songs happening, and Ally’s absolutely sure that if it weren’t for the magic dust that is celebrity, they would have had management knocking on the door with a noise complaint long ago.

As it is, she sits on the floor between her husband’s legs, singing Credence Clearwater Revival and Fleetwood Mac covers at the top of her lungs. She has great conversations with people she hasn’t seen in too long, and she laughs her head off, and she drinks three more gin and tonics than she ordinarily would.

At around 1am, Jack catches her eye across the room, gesturing that he’s going out to the balcony for a smoke.

Ally gives him a “you okay?” look, and he smiles at her easily in a way that lets her know he’s great. So, she just smiles back, waving at him as he heads outside.

Of course she knows the smoking is bad for him. And of course, on balance, she’d rather he quit altogether. But, he’s a two-or-three-a-day guy now, and she’s inclined to think there are worse habits in the world. And the fact of the matter - though it’s probably not fashionable to say it these days - is that when Ally ducks out the fire escape before a show and finds Jackson Maine leaning against a wall in blue jeans, dragging slowly on a cigarette, she thinks he looks sexy as fuck.

So, there’s that.

\-----

She doesn’t catch him coming back inside again, but obviously at some point he does, because next time she sees him, he’s back in a (literal) circle of their friends, not playing or singing himself, just watching Catherine and Lukas do their thing. She comes and settles herself on his lap, getting comfy, looping her arm around his neck.

“Pretty awesome, huh?” she murmurs, dropping a quick kiss on his lips, enjoying the feeling that all is entirely right with the world. Whenever she’d let herself imagine being a professional musician, nights like tonight were exactly what she’d conjured. Better than what she’d conjured, really.

One song flows into another flows into another, and she chimes in on a chorus or harmony here or there, maybe adding a little percussion by way of hands or feet. Mostly, though, she just listens. It’s incredible, really, the talent that these people for some reason have chosen to dedicate - day after day and night after night, for years now - towards helping she and Jack be the best they can be. She feels warm and glowy and intoxicated but not with alcohol (or, only a very little bit with alcohol).

She circles her hips a tiny bit on her husband's lap. Not so that anyone else would notice, but she knows he definitely will.

She does it once, then twice - his fingers pressing a little more into the bare skin of her legs in response - then eventually a third time.

“We gotta go if you’re gonna do that,” he says, his voice low and scratchy in her ear.

She turns to look at him. “Then let’s go."

\-----

The elevator has an attendant, because this is a Fancy Hotel, and consequently she and Jack are obliged to make small talk with said attendant the whole way up to the eighty sixth floor. Ally is convinced that becoming famous, contrary to what might be expected, has actually made her a more polite person than she ever was previously, so afraid is she that people will think she’s up her own ass.

Once they’re in the door to the penthouse, her eyes scan the plush surroundings. Whoever was charged with delivering their luggage appears to have done so, which is always a relief. On the sideboard, there’s an array of snacks and drinks, and a truly impressive floral display. The air smells fragrant and spa-like, the lighting warm and intimate.

“Pretty nice,” she comments aloud. There had been a point in time when in all honesty she could hardly bear the thought of another hotel suite - but these days the novelty, the luxury of it, has returned a little bit.

“Pretty fuckin’ beautiful,” Jack replies. He’s looking right at her, though, and she laughs a little, rolls her eyes a little, because he’s cheesy. But, sweet. He’s so sweet to her.

He pulls her down onto the couch and they kiss for what feels like a long time. Ally’s mouth opens, moving languidly against Jack’s, and she lets him lead. Even as her mind empties and every muscle in her body seems to soften and relax, it’s as though her blood is fizzing, throbbing, in her veins. It’s just such a hard feeling to describe, the comfort and the thrill of him at once - she’s written a dozen hit songs that haven’t managed it, and she knows she’ll probably be trying 'til she dies.

Then, the pleasant fog that’s clouded her thoughts is swiftly dispersed by the shrill ring of a telephone. Reluctantly, Ally freezes, pulling her lips from Jack’s.

“Ignore it,” he urges.

“Mmm, what if it’s important?”

“It’s not gonna be important. Who the fuck would even be calling us, on a hotel phone, at two o’clock in the morning?”

It’s definitely a fair point. But still. “Well, now I kinda want to know,” she says impishly, and she hops up off the couch. "Hang on one second."

Going over to the nightstand, she picks up the phone, and Jack follows to hover behind her, kissing her neck gently.

“Hello?” she says into the receiver.

“Good evening, Mrs Maine.”

And it’s probably so stupid, but something flutters a little inside of Ally. She loves it when people call her that, and for some reason it hardly ever seems to happen.

“This is Gerard Coppinger, the general manager, calling,” the voice continues. "We just wanted to check in, just to be sure that everything in the suite is to your satisfaction.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, everything's good - thank you. Everything’s wonderful,” she says, at which point Jack reaches one arm around her stomach and the other lower, the heel of his hand pressing firmly between her legs. She sucks in a deep breath through her nose, letting more of her weight fall back against him.

“Is there anything we can get you, anything at all?” Gerard asks, on the other end of the line, and Ally resists the sudden wicked impulse to tell him that what she principally wants to get at this exact moment is laid.

“You know, we’re honestly good, thank you so much,” is what she says instead.

“Well, do let us know if there’s anything you need and we’d be delighted to assist. Have a wonderful night.”

“You too,” she replies, and the second she’s dropped the phone, she turns in her husband’s arms, snaking her hands under his t-shirt before pushing the material up and over his head altogether.

“How did he even know we were in the room?” she wonders aloud, stripping off her own string vest so that she’s left in just her shorts and bra.

“Elevator guy,” Jack says simply, his hands and eyes going immediately to her breasts.

He leans down to her mouth then, kissing her deeply as his fingers reach around to unclasp her bra, peeling the straps down her arms carefully and tossing the thing somewhere. Unconsciously, Ally lets out a little sigh against his lips. She always finds it the nicest, most freeing thing to be relieved of her bra at the end of a long day, and even better when Jack’s the one doing the relieving.

He squeezes both breasts lightly, rubbing his thumbs over her nipples. They pebble immediately under his touch.

“God I’ve wanted to do that all fuckin’ day,” he mutters, and she looks up at him in surprise.

“You have?"

“You runnin’ around in that little top? Out on stage in it? Fuckin’ _yes_ ,” he says vociferously.

Ally laughs a little, the sound turning to a hum of pleasure as he dips his head to take a nipple into his mouth, doing whatever it is he does with his teeth and tongue. It’s a funny thing, she thinks, how she can touch her own breasts and feel essentially nothing much at all. And when Jack touches them, she sometimes feels like she could lose her feet from under her.

This is always what happens, though, she registers in some vague corner of her brain - she has plans for him and then he waylays her with his plans for _her_.

Not this time, she decides, while she still has the capacity for decision-making. She puts her hands on his cheeks and gently brings his face back up to hers, kissing his lips, his neck, his collarbone. She tugs his jeans and boxers down, smoothing her hand over his erection for a second before pushing him backwards onto the bed.

Jack lets himself fall, grinning up at her, and she makes short work of taking off his shoes and socks, disentangling his pants and boxers from his ankles. While she’s at it, she wriggles out of her own shorts, and then she’s on the bed along with him. Urging him to lay back against the mountain of pillows, she straddles his shins and leans forward, taking his dick into her mouth.

“Fuck,” he hisses, as soon as she makes contact, and she can’t help but smirk. She swallows him and sucks, swirling her tongue at his tip, moving her hand to where her mouth can’t reach, and the sound Jack makes is sincerely enough to make her moan a little herself.

She lifts her head up and down, her movements slow and deliberate, and it doesn’t take long before he reaches out blindly, clutching at her hair and tugging - not enough to hurt her at all, but enough to let her know he’s losing control a little. It feels fucking _amazing_ , to know that she can do that to him. She never would have believed it before she met Jackson - because before she met him, Ally could say with 100% certainty that she had never seen a penis and felt anything approaching a genuine urge to put her mouth anywhere fucking near it - but it makes her feel powerful. It turns her on.

She peers up at him as best she can, taking in the expression on his face as she shifts her hips a little, her hand sliding inside of her own underwear. She doesn't stop sucking him, the lion's share of her attention still on him, on making _him_ feel good, but she just needs _something_ to take the edge off her own ache.

“Guugh, you gotta stop,” Jack grunts out after a while, and his hand reaches back down towards her, this time the pads of his fingers stroking her forehead. “You’re too fuckin’ good at that, baby, I can’t,” he adds, like it pains him to say it.

Ally pauses, looking up at him again. After one last stroke of her tongue, she releases him from her mouth with a wet suction sound and sits up, resting back on her heels.

Then, she watches as her husband’s eyes widen.

“Are you tryna fuckin’ kill me?” he all but moans, and Ally realizes in that second that that her right hand, now motionless, is still underneath the plain black cotton of her panties. She just giggles in response, removing her hand - actually, on this occasion, she hadn’t whatsoever been trying to titillate.

“Don’t stop,” Jack says quickly, his voice coming out a little hoarse. “Don't stop. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

She smiles at that, looking into his eyes. He has the bluest of blue eyes, and she feels like she's seen his whole life in them at one point or another - everything he's ever been through, whether before he met her or since. It hasn't always been pretty. Right now, though, there isn’t anything there except love and lust, and it's hard to tell the two apart.

She decides to just take this moment - because she wants to, and because she knows that he wants her to, and because these days, she's simply not inclined to hide or second guess the things that feel good.

She shimmies upwards a little bit so that she’s more or less straddling his thighs, her legs still bent underneath her.

“Balance me, okay?” she murmurs, planting each of his hands just above her knees.

And then without another word, she’s touching herself again, her eyes closing, her hips starting to rock gently against her own fingers. Breathing deeply and evenly, she focuses every bit of her attention on the feeling of his thumbs stroking back and forth on her thighs, on the soft sound of his voice.

“That’s it,” he coaxes quietly. “...That’s it. You look amazing, Al, I swear to god… You’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever fuckin’ seen in my life.”

It takes hardly any time at all before she comes - no big performance to it, just a frozen expression on her face, a strangled sound escaping the back of her throat, a shudder as she lets herself topple to the side, rearranging her limbs so she can curl into Jack. He takes her wrist and licks her fingers clean, and she swears it's almost enough to make her whimper. It's possible that she _does_ whimper. 

He lifts one strong arm up and around her then, his other hand coming to her head, smoothing his fingers down her hair over and over, and it's hard for Ally to imagine anything on earth that would feel better than this, the cocoon of him.

“Good?” he asks her, after a minute, and she nods.

“Thank you.”

He laughs a little. “That was all you.”

And of course she know what he means, but still, she’s being truthful when she tells him, “it was actually a lot you.”

Another few minutes of quiet pass, and she starts to kiss his sides, along his ribs, wherever her lips happen to land. At the same time, she reaches over to stroke his erection, aware he must be almost painfully hard by this stage. 

“What do you want?” he asks her, and an unconscious smile rises to her lips, because he asked her that question the very first time they were ever together, and he’s asked her almost every single time since.

Sometimes, she says “I want whatever you want.”

Sometimes she says “just make me feel good.”

She says “make love to me,” she says “i want your mouth on me,” she says a dozen other filthy, tender things to him, when he asks her.

This time, she leans right in his ear, her words quiet but deliberate: “fuck me.”

And the thing about Jackson is that he always, always gives her exactly what she wants.

\-----

By the time they’re both finally completely spent, there’s not long until day breaks. They kiss each other’s lips and cheeks softly and lie nose to nose, and agree that even if (when) they’re exhausted in the morning, a night of chatter and jam sessions and laughter and sex will have been entirely worth it.

Jack’s asleep before Ally, and she finds herself thinking hazy thoughts about all the things she does with him, says to him, when they're together like this. Her twenty-year-old self, or indeed even her thirty-year-old self, just couldn't ever have imagined it. The intimacy of it all, the vulnerability of it, the fun of it.

In the first half of her twenties, she had had a series of relationships - if they could be termed as such - in which a blind man could have seen that she had been the one making all the effort, all the compromises.

She’d sat through innumerable crappy band practices, and she’d made dinners she could barely afford that were eaten without comment or thanks. She’d silenced herself when her opinions were talked over and she’d pretended she didn’t mind when texts went unanswered. She’d lain wide awake and entirely unsatisfied in queen size beds, trying her best to ignore the oblivious post-coital snoring from two feet away.

Looking back, Ally can’t actually believe some of the treatment she’d accepted during that time from men - boys, really - who hadn’t ever put more than the absolute bare minimum of effort into seeming like they gave a shit about her presence or absence, never mind something so extraneous as her _happiness._

Later, in the second half of her twenties and into her thirties, things had taken a turn. She’d moved back home, and it had turned out that sealing over the cracks in herself, boxing certain hopes away in the recesses of her brain - those things, in glorious combination with the need to earn some kind of living, took up almost every single bit of energy she had in her in a day. She'd found herself almost totally uninterested in men - a fact that continued to be true even during the rare periods in which she was actually dating one one them.

She knows for sure that she wouldn’t have bothered at all had it not been for Ramón's occasional, gentle encouragement. _You gotta give people a chance, mama_ , he’d say, _put yourself out there a little, huh_? And so she’d sometimes do coffees, dinners - those things were more or less fine. Very, very occasionally there had been okay-ish sex. The barest mention of a weekend away, though, or the first hint at meeting the parents, and Ally had slammed the breaks on in double quick time. (Of course, that these offers were even being made to her - that her own apathy seemed only to engender in men the type of enthusiasm that Ally would have been thrilled by in her younger years - _had_ struck her as kind of amusing, and shitty, and somehow not one bit surprising.)

When she met Jack, she was almost thirty two years old. And in him, she found - for the first time ever in her life - someone whose interest in her seemed, on every level, to be exactly equal to hers in him. Not less, not more - _equal._

It really is incredible, she thinks, the difference that that has turned out to have made. Certainly when people ask her these days what’s the secret to relationship success, it’s as good an answer as she can come up with.

The _why_ of it all, though, she really has no idea about.

She doesn’t know what made her give a shit about this guy’s childhood, for example, or what made him give a shit about hers.

She can’t explain the way in which, right from the get go, when their voices came together on that first chorus of _Shallow_ , every single person in that amphitheatre, including her and Jackson, seemed to know instinctively that something special was happening.

And then later that same night, when they were alone together, Ally's never been able to begin to make sense of that either.

Before that night, she hadn’t had sex with anyone in a really long time. Years. And suddenly there she was in a strange place, a strange bed, with a man she’d known for maybe 30 hours in total. He was a _famous_ man. And he was good-looking. Jesus, he was good-looking. She really didn’t know anything about his dating history, but logic would have seemed to suggest that models and actresses and the like had probably featured.

There was, in short, nothing about the situation that should have made her comfortable letting this man take all her clothes off. Letting him look at her naked body. Letting him run his finger along the bridge of her nose and every other inch of her. Letting him see the faint translucent lines marking the skin at the tops of her breasts and outsides of her hips. Letting him lick his tongue over them, in fact, until she gasped with pleasure.

There was also - at least in her own estimation - absolutely nothing whatsoever to suggest that Jackson Maine would be remotely turned on by any of those things.

But she _did_ let it all happen, without so much as a second thought. And Jack fucking _did_ seem pretty clearly to be very turned on by it. By her.

The whole thing had felt - and lying with Jack now, her limbs pleasantly heavy, a delicious sort of twinge between her legs, it _still_ feels - like a mystery to her. She's spent enough of her adult life having bad sex or no sex to know that there isn't any great miracle inherent in the act itself, of course. But this thing that happens between her body and Jack’s body - that has always, right from the very beginning, just _happened_ \- that feels different, somehow. That does feel like some sort of miracle. A thing they got but didn’t have to work for - that just arrived, unexpected and undeserved and amazing.

The universe has only ever provided Ally with one other gift like that in her lifetime, and it was music.

If she were being greedy, there’s maybe one more thing for which she might put in some kind of cosmic request at some point - seeing her husband with that little boy earlier had reminded her of that. But really, she thinks, nestling into Jack's bare chest now, listening to the peaceful, even cadence of his breathing, if she gets nothing else in this life - if it’s just music and this man - she’s already luckier than she ever, ever thought she'd be.

She could want for nothing else.  


End file.
